“Tim Tebow & Team Titus”

America World Adoption family, Travis & Faith Gingerich, from Bluffton, OH were able to share some exciting parts of their adoption story in a local Ohio newspaper, The Courier. Like many America World families, the Gingerich's received a grant to help them alleviate some of their adoption expenses. Read more about them below:

Travis and Faith Gingerich got some unexpected help from former NFL player Tim Tebow when it came time to adopt their son, Titus, from Ethiopia.

Tebow, now an outfielder for the New York Mets organization, created the Tim Tebow Foundation which provides an adoption aid grant to a family adopting a child with special needs internationally. The Bluffton couple received $8,000 that they used for travel expenses when they brought Titus home in 2015.

Faith said she and her husband were honored to receive the grant.

“He’s another one, he lives his faith,” she said of Tebow. “That’s how a lot of people know him because they know, ‘Oh yeah, he’s the one that is very open with his faith.'”

The couple had wanted children from the very beginning of their marriage.

“We talked about adoption, even before we were married,” said Travis, a K-3 special education teacher at Arlington School. “It’s just something that we had both been interested in.”

They thought it would be a domestic adoption until they went on a mission trip to South Africa in 2010.

“Then it was like, ‘Yeah, we love Africa, the entire continent, the people that are in South Africa’. So that really opened our eyes up to the need internationally,” said Travis. “Really, there are a lot of kids here and the foster system of course isn’t perfect. But we thought comparatively, they really have it pretty good here.”

The couple felt God was calling them to look to Africa, and that summer they applied to the America World Adoption program.

“The agency is incredible. We just had the most amazing experience with our agency,” said Faith, who works part-time as an assistant children’s director at College First Church of God. “They are very supportive from a Christian perspective, so they really understand when we said we were called to adopt.”